William Saletan writes in Slate that Obama is “raising a question that Republican candidates for president ought to answer: Our country has a strikingly high rate of killings. If it’s not because of our prodigious stockpile of firearms, what’s your explanation?” He then argues that they don’t have one. Fair enough.
But Saletan then steals a base. He says that Republicans are “betting people’s lives on the hunch that these factors—not the supply of weapons—account for gun fatalities.” He cites their opposition to laws tightening background checks, bans on certain types of rifles, and so forth. Next he goes back to noting that these politicians have not “offered a plausible reason to believe that something unique in American psychology, rather than our high volume of firearms, explains our homicide rate.”
The problem with the article is that one can simultaneously believe that the high volume of firearms contributes to our high homicide rate and that these laws aren’t good ideas. It’s actually pretty easy to believe both of these things at once, since none of the regulations at issue would do much at all to reduce our high volume of firearms. If one believes, as I do, that there are no practicable steps to reduce that volume enough to make a difference—because there are no steps that would enjoy public support, be consistent with civil liberties, and be able to be implemented—then the premise for which Obama and Saletan are arguing for doesn’t tell us anything useful about what we should do about homicide rates.